Splinters
by Aquaphobe
Summary: He steps on board, with the skinless monster wailing in his arms. Its blood oozes out of open arteries and gathers in a puddle at his feet. The engine roars. For minutes, for days, for years the train moves onwards, forwards, never stopping and never slowing. Until, finally, it does.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** I bet no one's surprised I don't own Harry Potter. I know I'm not. Just a little disappointed.

 **A/N:** It is a well known fact that I am trash. Hence why I'm starting this fic without finishing any of my others. I also have no idea where this'll be going, and will likely be writing it in very short, drabble-style chapters.

(This will be double-posted on AO3 too, under the same title/pseudonym)

...

 _Splinters_

1

...

He steps onto the train, with the skinless monster wailing in his arms. It's blood oozes out of open, convulsing arteries like tar, tracking down his bare arms, over the flat lines of his stomach, along the curves of his thighs until it reaches the floor. It gathers in a puddle at his feet.

The doors close with a click, and they are alone in the compartment. The monster's mouth gapes, and he watches as the raw cries gurgle, breathless, in the red hole of its throat. It is silenced.

The engine hums below them, behind them.

Louder. It growls.

Louder. It snarls.

Louder. It roars.

He opens his mouth too, breathes in like it's his first ever breath. Tastes rust and salt. Grave dirt and rain.

The train moves. Picks up speed, until the force of it has him leaning into every curve on the track, has him staring, unblinking, into the white abyss beyond the windows.

The monster shudders, nail-less, naked finger stubs grappling at his chest like it's trying to reach inside and get hold of his heart. Like a newborn clutching at it's mother's breast.

For minutes, for days, for years the train moves onwards, forwards, never stopping and never slowing.

Until, finally, it does.

The doors open.

Harry Potter does not step out again;

instead

he

falls—

and the monster falls with him


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** thank you to everyone who read and followed last chapter, and in particular to GuidingHand for your review!

 **NOTE:** As I have no intentions to post warnings for the individual chapters on this site, PLEASE, if you feel that you might want to know them prior to reading, I would recommend switching over tomy AO3 account instead, where I will put warnings in the end note of each chapter.

...

 _Splinters_

2

...

Several days after Olive Hornby discovers Myrtle Warren's body in the first floor girls bathroom, Tom Riddle finally finds a plausible moment to retreat into the Chamber of Secrets. It is after hours, and he's left the curtains around his bed sealed and silenced. It won't fool Nott, Dolohov, Rosier or Mulciber for long, but they were never his concern.

His diary is clutched in one hand, and in his other is his wand, held aloft so that he may light the familiar path through the gloom. Even though he has frequented the Chamber many times now over the course of the last year, his heart still pounds in his chest. He revels in the rush, in the way that it speeds up his breathing and distracts him from the ache that has sunken into his bones.

The clammy chill sticks to him like a second skin as he enters into the main Chamber, the _click_ of his heels echoing loudly over and over, like the warbling of a songbird.

When he reaches the centre, he stops. The only sound now is the drip of water into one of the long, stagnant pools beneath the mouths of the pipes. He breathes in moss and dust; stones and mildew and the faint, animal musk of his forefather's mighty basilisk.

Tonight, he has finally decided to take the next step in his quest to outmanoeuvre death. And where better than here, in his only home and birth-right, directly beneath Albus Dumbledore's nose? If Tom's speculations are right, and the Chamber reaches beyond the limit of Hogwarts magic, then he will manage to perform some of the darkest magic known to Wizardkind, and the foolish old man will never even know it.

Perhaps it _is_ only speculation– a wild, dangerous theory that could be the end of everything for him – but Tom feels, now, the urge to test it. The desperate need to stem the ache that has wrapped itself around his heart like a wounded creature.

Intellectually, he knows he ought to be more cautious. It will not matter if he does this now, here at Hogwarts, or if he waits another year and a half for graduation. The Chamber might be hidden from the rest of the scum that inhabits the school – might be off limits to any of the other houses – but that is not a _guarantee_ that it lies beyond the magical foundations. He could still, potentially, get caught. It would be far wiser to wait.

 _Far_ wiser.

But… the ache is unbearable. The crushing weight of Myrtle Warren's body on his conscience, on his _soul_ —

he wants to be _rid of it_.

And the intention was always there, behind his actions with the basilisk, wasn't it? He set out to make his first kill for this very reason. One person's – one _mudblood's_ – death is far less valuable than the immortality of the Wizarding World's saviour.

Lord Voldemort's existence must be, _must be_ , insured.

Tom must see his ambitions reached, at any cost.

 _And his chest aches under the burden of a thirteen-year-old girl's limp, cold body—_

So he sets his precious diary down on the slick granite stone at his feet, and he straightens.

He taps the side of his wand with one finger and the _lumos_ at the end detaches, rising slowly over his head and flickering like a lit wick. Shadows reach and retreat, throwing the long Chamber into relief. The gargantuan stone face of Salazar Slytherin watches, mouth closed and hollowed-out eyes locked onto him.

The frameless mirror that he conjures with a silent swirl of his wand hovers in the air before him, stationary, just as it would have were it hanging from a wall. For a long moment, all he does is study his face. He watches the light overhead flickering across the planes of his face, over pale skin and eyes as black as ink.

It's the unnerving, broken hitch of his breath that startles him out of his brief reverie.

Tom reaches up and loosens his tie with his free hand, until the green and silver cloth can be yanked up past his collar and flipped over one shoulder. Next are the buttons. One by one, trembling fingers follow the trail they make down the centre of his chest.

Halfway, he stops. Tugs either side until the white shirt gapes open, baring him from clavicle to abdomen.

His mirror image's mouth slips open at the same time as his and he watches, fascinated, as their wands rise in tandem, until they press into the skin of their sternums.

Heating until his skin blisters and splits open like overripe fruit, Tom Riddle drags the tip of his wand down to the underside of his ribs, hand steady even as his mouth gasps and his eyes sting against the pain. For an instant he stares at deep pink muscles and the sliver of stark white bone, before the torn flesh begins to weep, trails of blood spilling over the flat lines of his stomach and into the cotton of the shirt.

Tom thinks he might be sick; thinks that he's never felt anything so awful, never seen anything so hideous as his own blood leaking out of his open chest. But he leans down, flicks open the leather cover of the diary to the centre pages, and draws the palm of his weak hand through the welling blood. His chest is throbbing, his head is spinning, and the handprint he leaves on the paper is smudged where he drags his hand away to steady himself on the sharp edge of the mirror.

A moment to reorient himself. To study his work.

Messier than he might have liked, but it'll do.

When he draws his wand over the wound a second time, and a third, the tip glows amber and the scent of cooking, cauterised flesh fills the Chamber. It sizzles and smokes, even as the flow of blood slows to an unnatural ooze. He grits his teeth, pants through the pain, ignores the scalding tear tracks on his cheeks.

If his admirers could see him now, shoulders heaving, face scrunched in discomfort, would they still think him handsome? If they saw the slick, dark blood seeping from the furrow on his chest, would they still smile at him? Would they still sigh and giggle? Would they still simper?

No.

They're too weak, too pathetically _human_ to understand that in this moment, he transcends them. No longer will he be governed by the same fate as the rest of their race. He will finally, in body and soul, reflect what he has always been in magic and mind.

Lord Voldemort is a God among men.

The grit of his teeth shifts into a grin, and he shares it with his reflection.

Then, he moves onto the next step of his greatest masterpiece.

He's recited the runes and words so many times over the course of the year, has practiced and recalculated, planned and redrawn, so many times that he doesn't even have to question it.

There were so few accounts of the original spellwork that he's had to butcher the accounts and piece it all back together in the closest semblance of it he can muster.

Tom likes to think that he has recreated _art_.

The first rune, he carves into the soft meat of his abdomen, directly below the burnt wound, at the seat of his sternum.

 _Sowulo_. The thunderbolt. The base of power – the start and the end of the wheel.

Within seconds it _burns_. Burns worse than anything that Tom has ever before felt, like the sun itself is trying to tear its way out of his stomach. The great, murky depths of his magic responds, churns, an ocean coming alive.

He points his wand at the diary.

" _Fulmen_ ," he says.

The ocean crashes inside of him, against the barrier of his physical body, until it finds the hole in his chest. It pours out into the room, a tsunami of burning light that follows the line of the wand and smashes into the diary at his feet.

He shields his eyes against the brightness, braces his feet against the tidal pull.

To _Sowulo_ 's left, he carves a horizontal 'V'. The next step in the circle.

 _Kaunaz_. Fire. Knowledge. Self-awareness.

The column of light roars, and the paper before him bursts into flames. Ash to join the seared flesh – to close the opened wound, and stem the rush of magic.

Tom sways, feeling the cavernous space thrum with heat, feeling his magic tearing through him, funnelled out of him. His mirror image is alight in the glow, oranges and reds that shine in wide eyes.

" _Fulminis caldor_ ," he chants. He is _alive_.

Parallel to _Kaunaz_ , is the third. Three lines, tilted.

 _Unuz_. Fuel for the fire.

" _Ego sum victum._ " His throat is dry and his voice hoarse, but the words are clear.

On the floor, the ash where his precious diary once laid ripples, shifts.

The fourth, above _Kaunaz_ , is the cross.

 _Nauthiz_. Need, necessity, unbridled hunger and shadows.

All the air in the Chamber thickens now to treacle, and the _lumos_ overhead sputters out. The ash at the end of his columned magic grows darker; the flames shrink, as if being sucked in.

Tom's veins throb, and every inch of his skin tingles with an unnatural desire. The heat outside of him pools at the base of his spine, and it's hard to get anything out around the groan.

" _Obscurus est lux; atritas est vitae._ "

Opposite _Nauthiz_ , he fashions Thor's hammer into his skin.

 _Thurisaz_. To regenerate; to split and recompose.

The gathering shadows reform, taking solid shape, siphoning light and dark; the heat of Tom's life force, and the coldness of Myrtle Warren's sacrifice. His lust for power, his abhorrence for weakness and his fear of death are siphoned out of him, along with their opposites. All of his imperfect love, his mercy, his bravery.

Like a dementor, the diary latches onto his core through the column of light and magic, and feeds from him. The ache intensifies, and the tears that stopped restart, spilling over his eyelids.

 _"Coalesco_ ," he hisses.

Memories of his bleak, miserable childhood in Wool's Orphanage flicker by. Cowering below his bed, back against the wall and limbs folded close as the older boys tried to drag him out. The ache in his stomach and the saliva flooding his mouth as he pulls his bowl of thin, scentless gruel towards him, thinking it the finest _ambrosia_ after being locked away so long for misbehaviour. Numbness that floods into his extremities as the other children whisper behind hands, go pale when he walks by, flinch from him as though he is a monster.

 _Too many nights spent sobbing into his pillow, yearning for a mother he never got the chance to know, and a father who will never come to get him—_

Tom snarls, tries to fortify his Occlumency shields; cannot focus.

With the last of his will, Tom adds the final rune directly above the original wound, nestled into in the hollow of his collarbone.

 _Eiwaz_. The opposite of the thunderbolt, the opposite of sun and heat and life.

This is Tom's rune – this is the rune that most closely relates to his magic, that ties intricately with the nature of his wand.

The rune for death, to complete the circle.

" _Finite_."

For a moment, nothing.

And then a tearing—

 _—agonyfearohgodohmerlinpleasemakeitstopwhathaveidone—_

 _—_ right through his centre, right through his soul.

Sight abandons him.

Sound is non-existent.

All that he is and all that he will ever be is _half of himself stripped away from the whole_

and

Tom Riddle collapses.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Thank you for all the favourites and follows. I love you guys.

However, I just want to give you a quick heads up: I'm currently considering whether or not to move this fic over to AO3 in it's entirety, rather than continuing to post here, due to potential future content and my target audience. Let me know what you think?

...

Splinters

3

...

It is like looking through warped glass, and Tom knows that this is not something he is in control of.

This is something new, something unexpected.

 _A catalyst_ , he thinks, even as his soul tears itself in half and his brain boils in his skull, _like a phoenix tear in an infected wound._

For one splintered second, Tom is not Tom; he simply _is—_

 _—eighteen_

 _and he's_

 _aching ribs, burning lungs, breathing in ice and spitting out_

 _curses_

 _accusations_

 _torrents of white steam that fizzle in the rain_

 _he's a hunter, chasing_

 _he's a heart, staccato in his own ears_

 _he is feet pounding, eyes blurring, teeth grit_

 _against the acid of a green spell striking him_

 _crashing into his chest_

 _the wind surges up to meet him_

 _to escape him_

 _his lungs burst_

 _his ribcage_

 _—_ _—_ _concaves_

 _under the weight of the familiar magic_

 _the deafness_

 _the blindness_

 _that follows_

 _is like coming home_

…

Tom's eyes shoot open, staring into the familiar gloom of the chamber.

He gasps at the dank, sour air like he's starved of it. His skin feels like it's peeling off of his body, and his temples throb as though they'll burst from the mounting pressure inside of his skull.

All he wants is to clutch at his ruined chest and curl in on himself until he never has to hurt again. Eyelids flutter shut and his throat catches on a sob—

and then he's seizing up, every muscle pulled taut.

He holds his breath. Runs stiff, trembling fingers across the ground and tries to silently accio his wand from wherever he dropped it when he collapsed.

Barely six feet from where he lies, there is a wet, hacking cough.

Tom isn't alone.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Thank you to everyone that's been leaving comments, favouriting and following this story. I love you guys :)

For chapter warnings, please remember to go and read the story on my A03 account, under the same name.

...

 _Splinters_

4

 _..._

Scrambling to his feet as fast as his shaking, buckling limbs allow, Tom's hands and eyes flit across the floor, torn between searching for his wand and for the rasping, wheezing shape of a body cast in darkness.

At some point after he'd collapsed, his lumos had stuttered out, and the conjured mirror must have fallen. Fragments of glass crunch and scrape beneath his heels.

It's a rare day when Tom Marvolo Riddle is set off guard.

How—

How had someone gotten down here? How long must he have been unconscious, for him to have not noticed the intrusion? Tom's usually sharp mind struggles to function around a blistering migraine.

Finally, finally, he spots it. His blurred vision trips across the pale wood of his wand, flung halfway across the chamber in the opposite direction of the intruder. It is stark against the dark stones.

He raises his dominant hand out before him, tensing his fingers against the ceaseless trembling. Tries again to summon it to him. "Accio wand." His words are a hoarse whisper – a rush of hot air over dry lips – and his attempts to call up his magic are met with a slow, feeble trickle where usually there is a tidal surge. It tingles briefly in his palm, and the wand twitches, once, where it lies on the floor.

Despite the instinctive prickle at the nape of his neck that warns him not to turn his back on whomever lies, prone, beneath the mighty shadow of Salazar's statue, Tom stumbles towards his wand, struggling to stay upright. His sense of balance is compromised, as though he's damaged an eardrum.

Breathing laboured and heart painfully sluggish, the boy leans down for his wand and almost overbalances. His vision swims—

—a burst of fiery red hair and the scent of rust over freshly cut grass—

—and Tom fights the violent urge to gag against the intrusion. Bitter saliva floods his tongue. Gripping the side of his face in his free hand, he drags his weakened Occlumency shields up through sheer, blind willpower alone.

Bewitched. He must have been bewitched.

Teeth grit and panic rising until his weeping chest is tight with it, the young wizard turns on the spot. Wand in a white-knuckled fist, the remains of his drained magic rise up from his broken core.

Lord Voldemort will not be played for a fool.

He approaches the figure, brittle shards of mirror crushed and cracking underfoot. Raising his hand, he draws a silent lumos into being from the tip of his wand (and there is a wash of relief that he can do at least that much).

With a tap of his index finger, the lumos detaches itself and lazily climbs into the air, once again illuminating the chamber and glittering over water, wet rock and glass.

Tom's dark eyes flicker down to the prone body.

It is a male.

He is lying with his back to Tom. His skin is bare from his head to his feet. The light scatters over raised ribs and the sharp point of a hip, and even in the darkness there are welts, shiny white patches of old scar tissue, bumps in an over-accentuated spine. Dark red lashes and abrasions spider-web across his pale skin.

The man's body is almost skeletal. Small.

Starved. Beaten. Cursed. This is clearly a victim of torture.

Pacified by the poor state of health that the stranger is in, Tom fires a weak Expelliarmus at their back, little more than a safety precaution. The only response is the flex of ropey muscles in thin arms, a primal lurching as if to hold tighter onto something. Tom's eyes narrow. Not a wand, perhaps, but something.

He casts again – stronger, this time.

The man's body shudders.

Nothing. And yet his muscles flex.

Brows furrowing, Tom circles around the pitiful figure until he can peer down at his face.

The first thing he notices is the blood.

From some kind of a head wound, blood as black as ink spills into one shut eye, matting the hair on one side of his head and obscuring sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, thin lips.

But then Tom's attention is drawn down to the man's torso and he balks. Clutched in the stranger's arms, pressed tight to misshapen ribs and a stomach that looks like it's been blown open by a reducto is the black leather of his diary.

His heart stops.

Tom's lip draws back over his teeth and his fingers spasm around his wand until it creaks.

"Accio Diary."

Convulsions force themselves down the stranger's body as what is left of fingers curl into the leather cover.

He casts again, pouring his spiking anxiety into the spell. Cold sweat beads at his brow.

Still the man does not release his hold.

Expelling a hard breath, Tom steps forward, delivers a solid kick to the deformed man's side, the toe of his shiny black shoe sinking into the ragged, hollowed-out wound.

With a silent, gasping cry, the man rolls weakly onto his back, legs extending and eyes fluttering in the light.

Flashes of green.

Damp trails, shiny through the congealing blood, pool in the corner of hollow eyelids, and dribble over his cheeks. Tears.

Tom feels the air leave his lungs.

Not a man, but a boy.

This is a boy, barely older than Tom.

Young Lord Voldemort stares down into the face of this boy only briefly, perplexed at the growing mystery. How… curious this situation is.

The boy is not a Hogwarts student. Tom knows he isn't. Has had every single student in the school – and their family backgrounds, where useful – memorised from his first year. This dark haired, green eyed, beaten creature is not someone he recalls ever seeing. Which begs the question, who is he? Where did he come from? How did he get into a secret, guarded chamber under a heavily protected, unplottable magical school like Hogwarts?

Tom belatedly considers that this stranger might not be the only person down here. He certainly doesn't seem strong enough to have gotten inside the chamber by himself. Once again, the young wizard feels a stab of frustration at his muzzy, clouded thoughts.

"Homenum revelio," he whispers, straightening, his wand raised to the hall.

Nothing appears.

He casts again, ignoring the burning strain on his core, and turns to study the stretch of shadows behind him. No.

And again, sweeping his wand in the direction of the pipes.

By the time Tom's satisfied that they are alone, the boy is shuddering, his teary, half-mast eyes clouded over like he isn't really seeing Tom at all. The struggle of retaining consciousness is apparently too much for the stranger, for after a heartbeat of bright green eyes staring, unseeing – through him – they roll back into his skull.

The mangled hands (little more than poorly butchered stumps) go lax. One slides off his abdomen completely, leaving Tom's precious, precious diary unguarded.

He leans down, tentatively hooks his fingers around the underside of the cover, and lifts it away from the body.

Or at least, he tries to.

The second that his skin brushes the leather, his visions swims red, a chill like nothing he's ever felt before surging up his arm, locking his fingers, burning so cold it feels like fire. Someone's screaming, shrieking something that makes all the blood in his veins curdle. Every nerve is set alight. The wounded, hollow cavity of his chest where his magic and his soul took residence recoils.

He tears his hand away, but still his eyes are clouded red, his ears are ringing with phantom screams, his muscles are locked—

and the force of the curse cleaves him open, sends his insides spilling down his front, and somehow as his organs fall in tangles to the floor, the blood rushes up, up, up, until it fills his mouth, copper and salt, chokes him, bursts past his lips and pours down his chin, out his nose, his ears, eyes, and his head - his **head** —

The Slytherin's legs buckle, knees slamming into stone, and the pain jolts him back to himself. Glass slices into his bare palms and through his trouser legs to his skin.

The frigid, freezing red retreats just as fast as it washed over him, leaving him gasping, clutching at the floor. His eyes are squeezed shut, his breath coming in harsh pants. There's bile souring his mouth, and he breathes through it, through the turn of his stomach and the roughness of his breath.

Swallow it back. In, out, slowly. Swallow.

In the silence of the cavern, past the rush of his breath, there is laughter. Laughter so quiet, so strangled, it's hardly a sound at all.

But it's enough for Tom's head to shoot up. Enough for him to scrabble for his wand.

Barely a foot from his face are those hollow, haunting green eyes. Half-lidded, glazed. Staring. At him, not through, this time. Not now.

The stranger's face is twisted into a grin, white teeth bright where they aren't stained pink. He looks, to Tom, like something that's crawled straight up from the bowels of hell. The Slytherin can't look away as the thin, bloody face scrunches around a breathless, body-shaking laugh. The boy quivers and coughs that wet, hacking cough with the force of it.

Throughout, his gaze never leaves Tom, like this is the best joke he's ever seen.

Tom is furious. Tom is terrified. He's frozen to the spot, even as the stranger's rattling laughter dies to a spluttering wheeze. The tracks in his blood-caked cheeks have grown more pronounced, the skin beneath the thick layer just as stark a white as the rest of him. The grin falls to a thin line, the corners of his mouth curled up. Those hazy green eyes travel over Tom's face, and he' s lost.

Time seems a petty insubstantial thing, stuck in the dark of the chamber, eyes glued to this hideous, deformed creature. Tom's perfect, powerful mind is—

is not. It is nothing but raw sensation; he's numb with it.

And then the stranger's lips part, his tongue curling around words Tom can barely make out over his own breathing. "Why... always y-ou...? Always comes b-back to-" Another rattling cough overwhelms him, and those eyes scrunch shut.

Whatever spell held Tom locked in place breaks, and he wrenches himself upright, away. His thoughts crash back down into him, a hundred miles a minute. He forces himself up onto his feet, knees throbbing and eyes wild.

Everything is disjointed, nonsensical. All of his carefully laid plans, uprooted, torn out and churned up by this— by this—

what is he even supposed to be?

"Who are you?" He spits the words like venom, and his throat stings. "Who the hell are you, and what have you done to me? To my diary?"

Coughs easing up, the stranger's eyes remain closed. His torn up abdomen rises and falls in a jolty fashion. He's barely conscious, Tom ascertains. Tom's horcrux – not right, something's wrong with it, with his soul fragment – lies placid against his wrecked torso.

When the silence stretches for too long, Tom's tattered patience snaps. "Answer me!"

Stirring, the boy's eyes slip open the barest fraction. The grin is back, and his mouth is as red as his face now.

Tom bares his teeth. "Tell me."

The stranger watches, silent and mocking, smile stretching wider in a sick parody of amusement.

"I'll kill you if you don't talk. I'll cut your tongue out of your head and shove it far enough down your throat that you choke to death on it—"

That laughter. That laughter. The stranger shudders with it, a dying animal beyond sense. "I'd like... to see you try."

Rage courses through Tom, overriding his frustration, feeding on his blind confusion and fear.

"Crucio!" His magic skips down his arm, a meagre strand of it that flits from the tip of his wand and wavers in open space before striking its intended target.

He may be far weaker than usual, but this is a spell that Tom has researched extensively. He has practiced the wand movements, has memorised what is known of the spells origins. And the kind of resentment needed to fuel such a cruel curse comes to Tom as naturally as breathing.

The deformed boy shudders, gurgles, bloody grin widening until his mouth gapes and his body thrashes, mangled arms flailing and Tom's diary toppling to the ground as his back arches off of the flagstones.

Tom only lifts the spell when his eyes roll and pink froth trickles down his cheek and chin. The magic sputters out like a stifled flame. Shaky limbed and breathing laboured, the Slytherin looks down at the lolling head and the unnaturally still body.

He thinks, through a spike of cold fury, fine. I'll leave you to bleed to death. And then I'll feed you to Salazar's basilisk.

He's turning away, back straight and expression schooled. All he can think is that he needs to leave, needs to get back into the castle before it gets too late, before he is missed. He has no idea how much time he's lost.

"Is that... the best... you can do?"

It's a split second reaction, and Tom knows that he ought to stop, ought to think this situation through, nonsensical, illogical as it is, ought to...

But he doesn't. He whirls around, pulls his leg back and aims a kick at the stranger's head, connecting so hard with his face that there's a crunch, a garbled sound, and a rivulets of fresh blood pouring from a mangled lump that was once a nose. The boy lies, still.

Tom's almost positive he's broken his own toes.

After a moment of bated breath and buzzing silence, Tom steps back - hobbles, really. The puddle surrounding the other teenager expands past its congealing borders, spilling into cracks between giant stone slabs and inching through the darkness towards the gutters.

Silent, introspective (still sick to his stomach and so angry he could peal the boy apart, limb from limb and muscle from skin), he considers the mess that he has made.

He's been cursed, or bewitched, and his diary – his horcrux, his precious soul, oh God oh God – has been tampered with somehow. He needs to investigate this troubling possibility.

Tom looks down at himself, and studies his cut palms, the mess of his chest, the ragged tears in his trousers and the foot he'd injured just moments before. A trip to the Hospital Wing is absolutely not an option, and he can't risk anyone seeing him like this, but his magic is… extremely limited. He fears that, if he tries to push himself too far, the consequences might be dire.

He shouldn't have wasted his magic on the Cruciatus; should have practiced some self-restraint.

Taking a slow breath, Tom casts Episkey on his foot, and Tergeos his torso and his white shirt to remove the worst of the blood, his face a grim set against the pain.

After buttoning his shirt and adjusting his tie with unresponsive fingers, he summons a plain black cloak to throw over his front to hide the blood already budding up through the fabric again.

Tom pauses.

He peers down at the mangled young man lying on the floor, and considers what to do.

There's a large part of Tom – the bloodthirsty, reckless, admittedly Gryffindor part of him – that just wants to leave this boy for dead, despite the danger and the puzzle that he presents. He wants nothing more than for this impudent, patronising creature to die just as pathetically as he appeared…

But that would be a waste, he knows.

Despite the agonising drain that leaves him unsteady and clutching at his head, Tom summons a second cloak to throw over the stranger, and even goes so far as to cast Vulnera Sanentur and Anapneo, to knit the worst of his abdominal injury and to clear his throat of any blood. Only a portion of the boy's stomach wound knits, and he isn't sure that the final spell works at all.

Sickened by his inability to cast, Tom turns to Slytherin, slipping his eyes shut and calling up the image of a coiled snake. With it image in mind, he raises his voice.

"Speak to me, Slytherin, Greatest of the Hogwarts four."

The grate of stone on stone follows, and a rush of cool air spills out of his cavernous mouth like the last exhale of a corpse.

Tom adjusts his footing, steadies himself from swaying. This has to be quick, he thinks, adjusting his grip on his wand.

Mercifully, it isn't long before Tom's request is met, and the mighty basilisk emerges from her master's throat, slipping out into the chamber with a quiet scraping of hardened scales over rock and a long, hissed breath.

Acid yellow eyes, bulbous even in the basilisks huge face, peer down at him, and Tom stares back, unaffected by her magic the way that normalwizards are.

"Master…" Her crooning fills the chamber, and she approaches with a weaving head. Her long, forked black tongue flits out, tasting the air as she drags herself across the chamber to Tom. The crest on her head stands at the scent of blood, and her eyes lock on the stranger's body. "A gift, a gift for me?"

"That is not for you," Tom says, inhaling the musk of stale water and dead things that is unique to his pet. "This is mine, and is something I wish for you to… guard."

"Hungry, so hungry, Master. Just a taste, just a bite—"

"Silence," he says. His voice is sharper than usual, and the basilisks mighty head withdraws, crest flat and neck curled.

A chastised hiss echoes off of the shadowed walls. "This is yours, yes, scrawny thing is yours, not mine… This scrawny thing, I shall guard for Master."

Perhaps her subservient nature would have settled his nerves and placated his temper on a usual night, but he does not reach out to stroke his hand down her muzzle or praise her the way he might have otherwise. Tom just doesn't have the energy.

"Watch it, make sure it doesn't move. Do not kill it." He looks down at the bloody mess that is the boy through blurring eyes, struggles to feel anything beyond the impending sense of lethargy that is weighing down on him. "If it escapes, find me through the pipes. If anything else appears, kill, capture, eat; I do not care. If it dies…" He pauses, struggles to think of any possible threat. "Do not let it die."

His basilisk hums, air around it sparking imperceptibly as his orders settle around it like a noose. It is not happy, he thinks, but the possibility of other prey turning up has it lowering its head to the floor, the side of its jaw brushing against his arm and shoulder affectionately. "Yesss, Master…"

Tom inclines his chin, settles one hand fleetingly on the creatures mighty crown, and with one final look at the mangled body being slowly obscured from sight by the huge coils of Salazar's greatest gift, he leaves.

Time to return to reality…

...

A/N: Hey guys, please leave me a review to let me know what you think.


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